Google Postmaster Tool

Summary: This answer covers the steps required to enable the Google Postmaster account for your domain.

What is the Google Postmaster: Google created a portal intended to provide High Volume senders access to their email reputation. The UI is broken out into five dashboards.

Spam Rate: This dashboard shows the volume of user-report spam vs. email sent to the inbox. Only emails authenticated by DKIM are eligible for spam rate calculation.

IP/Domain Reputation: Domain and IP reputation give a sense of whether the Gmail spam filter might mark emails from that Domain or IP as spam or not. Keep in mind that spam filtering based on thousands of signals and that Domain & IP reputation is just two of them.

Feedback Loop: This dashboard only shows up for senders who’ve implemented the Gmail Spam Feedback Loop (FBL). Click any data point on the graph to see a table with the identifiers flagged by FBL and their corresponding spam rates.

Encryption: Shows TLS encrypted traffic vs. all mail received from that domain, and consists of two distinct graphs within the same dashboard.

Delivery Errors: Shows rejected/temp-failed traffic vs. all authenticated traffic coming from that domain, within a single graph. Typically messages are rejected or temp-failed with the SMTP error codes 550 or 421 respectively. Click a data point to see a table with the reason behind why the traffic was rejected or temp-failed.

Steps to Validate a Domain: The following section outlines the steps required to authenticating a domain within your Google Postmaster account. Please note that unless you’re a high volume sender (>200k a month), the information it provides may not be actionable from a deliverability standpoint.

Create a Gmail Account: A Gmail or Gmail App (Corp Domain) is required to have access to the Gmail Postmaster portal. Once one is created or chosen (From an existing list), you’ll begin the process here: https://gmail.com/postmaster/

Follow the ‘Get Started’ to add your email Domain

Add the domain you wish to Monitor: Please note that it’ll be essential to include ’Sub Domains’ information if that is used by for your marketing mailings.

Verify Your Account: The record will need to be placed in the DNS of the related domain. The options are either TXT record (ScreenShot Below) or CNAME (Not Shown).

Verify Domain: Once the record is added (TXT/CNAME), you will then be able to confirm ownership the domain dropdown and selecting ‘Validate Domain.’ If there’s an issue, the google dashboard will note the failure.

Assigning Domain Access: After completing the steps necessary to validate your domain, you may need to grant access to other parties to monitor and help troubleshoot performance-based issues. The following steps cover this process:

Add User To Account: At the bottom right-hand side of the Manage User dashboard, there’s a big red button. Pushing this will open a window which will allow you to grant access to the related domain data. Please note that each domain will require that you complete these steps.

Delete Users: The option to delete access is also on this same page. It’s recommended when access is no longer required, that removing a user from your account will help ensure data privacy for your email program.